


danger on deception island but better

by kpopcircusbaby



Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 03:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17195537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kpopcircusbaby/pseuds/kpopcircusbaby
Summary: a short experiment on a few ideas i had for a ddi au.





	danger on deception island but better

**Author's Note:**

> this was a secret santa gift i wrote for someone over the course of a few days!  
> it's pretty much just the plot of danger on deception island with a few revisions, including:  
> -jenna and katie are dating  
> -holt scotto is no longer a republican  
> -hilda swenson is a lesbian  
> -characters can swear now  
> -and a few more that i won't spoil

_Dear Ned,  
Here I am, on a ferry bound for Deception Island…_

Nancy Drew walked along the path to the docks, her suitcase rolling along beside her. Scanning the dock, she saw several large signs depicting an orca and the words “Firestone Tours” in bold letters. This must be the right place.

She walked down the ramp to the boat and spotted a woman in flannel hopping off of a bike with an unreasonably large bag of groceries on the back. The woman started when she saw Nancy standing there.

“Hi!” the woman said. “You must be Nancy. I’m Katie Firestone. C’mon, I’ll take you down to the boat.” She started walking down the ramp and Nancy followed behind her.

“You came with perfect timing. George could not have picked a better time to arrange for you to come out here. Just last week this orca showed up in the channel, and now it – oh my gosh…”

Katie’s boat had been absolutely trashed. The engine compartment was open and parts had been ripped out of the engine and thrown all along the deck. Books lay strewn on the floor, and a note was taped to the dashboard: _Stop meddling – or else!_ The last two words had been underlined several times.

Nancy turned to Katie. “Who do you think could have done this?”

“I’m really not sure,” Katie said, “but for what it’s worth, I did shoot my mouth off pretty good at the town hall last night. An orca showed up last week in the channel, and I called the National Marine Fisheries Service.”

“I take it some people didn’t like that?”

“No, they don’t. The government ordered all boats to stay far away from the orca, so all the fisherman have to take the long way around the island now to get out to sea, which costs them a lot of time and fuel. I defended myself pretty strongly at the town hall last night. Anyone in that room would have been angry enough to do it, and almost the whole town was there.”

Nancy frowned. “I’ll start narrowing down the list of suspects. Who should I talk to first?”

“Nancy, look. You’re on vacation! Just go relax, or bike around town, or take my kayak out. I can handle this on my own.” Kate looked at her engine and sighed. “I’ll tell you what – take my bike and go down to the Hot Kettle. It’s the best pub in town, and the clam chowder they serve there is killer. Just enjoy yourself, there’s no need to play detective for my sake.”

 

Jenna, a local woman from the Swinomish tribe who ran the Hot Kettle, made a mean clam chowder, and she also had a pretty mean temper. Nancy sat on a barstool and listened to her and Holt Scotto – a local fisherman and politician – talking about the orca situation while Jenna made coffee and cleaned the counters.

“I don’t care what Miss Fancy Schmancy Science Degree says. That orca out there should be rejoined with her pod as soon as possible. Period. End of story.”

Holt sipped his coffee with a frustrated look on his face. “I know she pissed people off pretty good last night, but she’s got a point about that whale out there. I just wish she didn’t act so high and mighty all the time, like we’re all just dumb useless workin’ folk who have no business making decisions about our own land and livelihoods.”

“She wouldn’t be the one shooting her mouth off if it were _her_ income that was being hurt by all this, I’ll tell you that.”

“When I arrived at her boat this morning, it was vandalized,” Nancy said. “Now she won’t be able to go out and check on the orca for awhile.”

Jenna put down the mug she was drying and frowned, leaning against the back counter. “There I go again, saying things I don’t mean. I’m not happy about what happened to her boat, but I wouldn’t be sad if the experience made her less of an ass.”

She stood up and started washing some dishes, and Nancy noticed that the front of her shirt had a weird design on it. It was a long serpent, with several fins and the head of a horse.

“What’s that on your shirt?” Nancy asked. “The creature with the horse head?”

“Oh, that’s the Snake Horse! Most people call it Caddy though, short for ‘Cadborosaurus.’ It’s a sea monster that lives in the harbor and comes around every so often to cause trouble. Or at least,” Jenna said, grinning, “that’s what the legends say.”

“Do you believe them?”

“Hell yeah I do! What’s cooler than having the town you live in named after a _sea monster?_ ”

“You seem to know a lot about these legends.”

“I make it my business to! No one’s ever gotten proof of its existence, and you can bet if someone ever does it’ll mean more tourists will come to visit Snake Horse Harbor, which means cold hard cash for everyone in town, myself included. I keep my camera with me every time I take my boat out, just in case I spot it. No such luck yet, but I’m not giving up hope.”

Holt chuckled. “And I’m sure I’ll be president before you get a picture of that thing.” He stood up and paid his tab. On his way out, he clapped Nancy on the shoulder. “If you ever need any help while you’re here, let me know. And tell Katie I’m sorry about her boat. But don’t tell her the part where I think she kinda deserves it.”

 

Nancy wandered along the beach, clam bucket in hand. She’d gone around town and talked to everyone she could find, but all of them had said more or less the same thing that Jenna and Holt had. She’d eventually wandered back to the Hot Kettle, defeated, and Jenna had ordered her to go clamming instead of sitting in the restaurant moping.

She was glad for the opportunity to do something at least semi-relaxing. The townspeople were kind to her only up to the moment that she told them she was visiting Katie, at which point they usually got angry and refused to speak with her any further. Katie was right – it didn’t seem like there was anyone in town that wasn’t mad at her. Narrowing down the suspects was going to be impossible, at least for now.

After finding the last clam she needed, Nancy sat down along the shore and watched the tide for a few minutes. George hadn’t been kidding when she’d talked up how beautiful this area was. She felt like she could sit here for hours, just watching the waves, but she knew that with a mystery to solve she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else.

Something tapped her foot. She automatically recoiled back, and relaxed when she realized it was just a glass bottle. She opened it and found a note inside. It was written on light red paper, and read _Rosebud_ in the middle, with what looked like some GPS coordinates written on the top right. What an odd thing to put in a bottle. Why had someone made this?

Nancy put the note in her pocket, and was about to leave when something else caught her eye. In one of the tidepools by the shore, there was a piece of reddish-brown driftwood. There was something odd about it – the wood itself looked old and worn, as if it had been underwater for a long time, but the edges were very sharp, like it had been broken off of something recently.

Nancy chucked the piece of driftwood into the clam bucket and biked back to the Hot Kettle, hoping to get some answers from Jenna and Holt.

 

A few hours later, Nancy had learned two important details:

First, after consulting Jenna about the strange note in a bottle, she learned that it belonged to Hilda Swenson, a woman who had lived in Snake Horse Harbor for several decades until her wife passed away and she ended up moving across the channel to a small island by herself. She had once been a screenwriter in Hollywood, and had a long-standing reputation for being eccentric that eventually turned into a nasty rumor that she was downright crazy. She’d been sending out these strange messages in bottles for several years, and no one had been able to figure out what she was trying to say.

Second, after getting the phone number that Holt gave her for a local historian, she learned that the piece of driftwood she found was broken off a ship called the _SS Whitechapel Dawn_ , a cargo ship that had sank a few miles off of the coast near Snake Horse Harbor a few years ago. There were rumors from the crew that the ship had potentially been used for smuggling, but nothing had ever been proven, especially considering the contents of the ship were now lying miles under the ocean. The historian had said that there was no way any natural events could have caused that piece of driftwood to resurface, and that it should have been impossible for Nancy to have found it lying on the beach.

Nancy leaned over another bowl of clam chowder as she pondered all of this information. How on earth did vandalism, an eccentric woman across the channel, and an impossible piece of driftwood all fit together? Why were all of these strange events all happening now, at the same time?

There was only one lead she had at the moment – the GPS coordinates.

Nancy kayaked to the coordinates listed on the note to find a small, tranquil beach that had been nearly hidden by the fog. She explored the shore carefully, and came across a strange box that seemed to require a password. Diving into her comprehensive knowledge of maritime signal flags, she entered the code: ROSEBUD.

The box opened. Inside was a note and a remote control with just one large, rectangular button. The note read: _You’ll know when you need this._

That was it? Her last lead had just gone up in smoke. This whole thing had been pointless. She was no closer to finding out who vandalized Katie’s boat than she’d been when she’d started.

Sighing, she slid the remote into her back pocket and went back to the kayak.

 

Nancy kayaked back to the boat. Katie wasn’t there, and Nancy was about to assume she’d gone back into town to buy engine parts when she saw that one of the doors on the boat was open, a door near her bunk that had been locked when she first arrived. Inside she could hear some papers being shuffled and then thrown on the floor.

“God _damn_ it!” Katie yelled, and walked out of the door. Her face turned pale when she realized that Nancy had seen her.

“What were you doing?” Nancy asked, poking her head into the small closet before Katie could shut the door.

The room contained several boxes filled with equipment, mostly cameras and microphones. Taped to the wall were dozens of pictures – on one side of the room, there were pictures of an orca and its pod, and on the other side were pictures of a blurry, indistinct shape swimming in water.

“You caught me,” Katie said, looking sheepish. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but… I lied about there being an orca. I took my boat out to sea and photographed an orca pod and started telling people that there was an orca in the channel.”

Nancy frowned. “I don’t get it, why would you lie about something like that?”

Katie’s eyes flashed. “Because there _is_ something in the channel, and I don’t want anyone else to go near it until I’ve had a chance to get solid proof of what it is.”

“What do you mean?”

Katie grabbed her lightly by the shoulders. “Caddy! She’s real! At least, I’m pretty sure she is. I started seeing something large moving around the channel a few weeks ago, and I’ve set up cameras all around the harbor and going around in my boat trying to get a good photo of it. I started the rumor about the orca, and even got the government involved so that any other boats would have to avoid any large object they saw swimming around. I’m the only one legally allowed to get close to her!”

Nancy glared at her. “Katie, this is ridiculous. There’s no such thing as sea monsters, and I can’t believe you lied to the entire town about this. You need to start coming clean and apologizing for what you did.”

“How could I possibly do that?” Katie said. “And have the town even more pissed at me? At least if I prove that Caddy is real, they’ll start liking me again-”

“Katie, there is _no_ such thing as Caddy. The government is going to realize you lied to them eventually, and you’re going to be in huge legal trouble either way.”

Katie sighed, leaning against a wall. “I don’t know… You might be right. I don’t like it but… I could always go to Holt and ask him to help me, he’s usually been pretty kind to me-”

Katie’s phone rang. She answered it. Almost immediately her face turned pale. She started shaking, and after listening for a few seconds, she hung up the phone with shaking hands.

“Th-there was a man, with a really deep voice… He said not to tell anyone about what I’ve discovered, and for you and me to take the boat out and meet him tonight at the edge of the channel, by the channel markers. He said he’s kidnapped Jenna and he’ll kill her if we tried to run.”

Nancy didn’t move, but her heart started beating faster. None of this made any sense. What had Katie seen in the water that she’d mistaken for Caddy? Whatever it was, someone didn’t want her to find out. And they were willing to kill to get their way.

About three things, she was absolutely positive:

First, whatever was in the channel was _not_ an orca.

Second, someone in this town was up to something, and Nancy was sure the phone call was somehow connected to strange remote and the piece of driftwood she’d found on the beach.

And third, she and Katie were on the brink of discovering the truth about everything that was going on, and they might both be about to lose their lives.

 

Katie maneuvered her boat carefully through the rocks. They were quickly approaching the edge of the channel, but the fog was so thick that they could barely see a few feet in front of them.

“Nancy, I’m so sorry,” Katie kept saying. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

“Don’t worry, Katie. It’ll be fine. I can’t tell you how many times this kind of thing happens to me. Criminals aren’t usually as ruthless as they try to seem.”

“I really hope you’re right.”

The boat continued for several more minutes until they reached a channel marker. Katie turned off the engine and they sat in silence.

Not a moment later a huge spotlight cut through the fog. Nancy and Katie covered their eyes as several figures boarded their boat. The figures grabbed them and threw sacks over their heads and began to lead them somewhere, and then Nancy was promptly shoved into some kind of metal wall.

“Climb,” a man with a rough voice said, and grabbed Nancy’s hands and placed them on the rungs of some kind of ladder. She began to climb.

It was slow going. She had to feel her way carefully for each rung on the ladder, and she could hear Katie doing the same thing below her.

After several minutes, she couldn’t feel another rung above her, and she felt rough hands grab her under her arms and jerk her over a railing and onto a floor. Katie squealed as the same thing happened to her a few seconds later. They were both hauled onto their feet and led forward for a minute, and then their hands were tied together and then tied again to another railing. The sacks were pulled off their heads.

As Nancy’s eyes adjusted to the light, she could see that they were on a boat, one much larger than Katie’s. They were tied to one of the side railings on the deck, and scattered around the rest of the deck were large piles of wooden shipping crates labeled _SS Whitechapel Dawn_. A group of tall, menacing-looking men stood directly in front of the girls. In the middle of the group was a man that Nancy recognized as Andy Jason, the man who ran another local whale watching business that competed with Katie’s.

“What are you _doing_ here?” Nancy asked him before he could even open his mouth to speak. “Why did you kidnap us, and why do you have all of these crates?”

Andy laughed. “I want to be filthy fucking rich, that’s why.” He walked over to one of the crates and opened it, pulling out what looked like animal furs. “The _SS Whitechapel Dawn_ was smuggling some _very_ valuable furs into the US, and I knew when the ship went down that I could find a way to recover them. It took five years, but I managed to pull it off...”

“How?” Nancy asked, trying to keep him distracted. If she twisted a certain way, she could just barely reach into her back pocket. “How did you get those crates? They fell too deep for anyone to recover them!”

“That’s my secret, and it’s going to stay that way.” He started walking back towards them.

With fumbling hands, Nancy pulled the remote out of her pocket and pressed the button.

Andy crouched down in front of Katie. “ _You_ almost ruined it, but I have to admit the bit about the orca was cute. It helped me at least, having other boats keep their distance.”

Nothing was happening. Nancy pressed the button again and again, and the remote slipped out of her hand and fell behind her, off the side of the deck. She heard a soft splash as it hit the water.

“And now you two are going to die, and I’m going to sell these furs and disappear with my money. The town won’t be _too_ upset when I tell them that the two city girls kayaked too far past the channel markers and got swept away by the currents. If it makes you feel any better, I lied about bringing Jenna here. She’s still in town, safe and sound in her restaurant...”

Nancy could hear something now, in the water. She turned her head to the side to look, and saw a large, blurry shape moving underneath the waves…

A huge roar erupted from behind her as something massive rose out of the water. Andy and the rest of the men reared back in shock. Nancy looked up and saw a serpentine figure with the head of a horse rising more than a dozen feet out of the water. Katie gasped.

Caddy roared again, and the men on the deck started screaming and scattering in all different directions. The sea monster lunged at one of them in one powerful motion, missing by a few feet and crushing one of the crates instead.

After a few more close calls, Caddy finally found her target. Nancy and Katie watched with wide eyes as she caught Andy Jason in her teeth, reared back, and swallowed him whole.

 

The people of Snake Horse Harbor practically exploded with excitement after hearing about what happened to Nancy and Katie. When Holt and the coast guard arrived shortly after the men on Andy’s ship had fled, he almost fainted in shock when Caddy rose up out of the water one last time to look them all over with one giant eye before sliding back under the waves.

Holt also helped Katie confess to everyone what she had done, and it was a bit easier for them to forgive her since she’d done it in the name of their beloved sea monster, and easier still when she realized that one of the cameras she’d set up along the shore had managed to record video of the encounter on the boat.

The first person Katie went to with the footage was naturally Jenna, and Nancy could tell that their conversation went well, both by the fact that the video showed up on every major news channel the next day and that at Nancy’s going away party at the Hot Kettle, she saw the two of them making out in a back corner of the restaurant.

The government was understandably not happy that Katie had lied to them, but the fines they gave her were nothing compared to the payout she got for selling her footage to the major news networks. She and Jenna had also apparently joined forces and bought out Whale World, creating a whole line of Caddy-themed merchandise and expanding Katie’s boat tours.

All was well. As Nancy prepared to board the ferry, she spotted something floating in the water by the dock. She picked up the glass bottle, and opened it to find another note.

_Thanks for saving the people of my harbor._

_Come visit sometime._

Nancy smiled, tucked the paper into her pocket, and boarded the ferry home.


End file.
